QCRI’s summer internship programme comes to an end

The summer internship programme of Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) was concluded with a closing ceremony held at the QCRI office in Tornado Tower on Wednesday. In total, 22 students - 18 from universities in Qatar and four international students - participated in the intensive eight-week programme. Dr Tarek El Fouly from Qatar University (QU)’s College of Engineering was the guest speaker at the concluding ceremony.During the ceremony, the students presented the results of their work with a poster session, where they had the opportunity to answer questions posed by a judging panel. The recognition for best research was awarded to Mona Thowfeek, a recent graduate from QU, and Syed Ali Hashim Moosavi of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, who worked with the Arabic Language Technologies team on a project that evaluated optical character recognition systems for historic Arabic documents.   Dr Ahmed K Elmagarmid, executive director of QCRI, said it was essential for Qatar’s development to identify, teach and nurture students interested in research and technology. “Our summer internship programme is designed to prepare these young students for such opportunities by having them work closely with our scientists to solve real computing challenges. The internship programme this year was the largest it has ever been and the students worked on a varied range of projects, with each having a societal impact,” he explained.The programme started in early June with an orientation session that introduced the students to QCRI, its priority areas of research and the programme’s mentors. Throughout the summer, the students teamed up with QCRI’s scientists and worked on 12 projects that helped progress research in areas of  humanitarian computing, optical character recognition, speech translation for meetings, next-generation elastic databases, socio-graphic mapping and biomarkers in diabetes.  During the eight-week programme, the summer interns also enjoyed cultural excursions and team-building activities. The students had a number of opportunities outside the classroom environment where they interacted with each other and exchanged insights into their projects.